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A decade ago, everyone wanted a piece of Alan Greenspan. The Federal Reserve chairman had the economy riding so high, then-presidential candidate John McCain famously quipped that if the man died, he wanted to have him stuffed and put up on the wall at the Federal Reserve. And all over the world, ordinary people really did put Greenspan on their walls, in the form of Erin Crowe's oil portrait of his familiar, wrinkly visage. But now that the Greenspan bubble has burst along with the housing bubble he created, these people are shamefacedly hiding said portraits away in the same place they keep their Nixon buttons and Idi Amin bobblehead dolls.

One of them, Brian McAnaney, a lawyer in Stamford, Connecticut, seems to regard his as something of an obscenity.

"It is a little hard to find a place for Mr. Greenspan in my homes," Mr. McAnaney says. "He is still there, but in a closet, because it is difficult to find a place for him in a family setting."

Another, Tampa businessman Matthew Schirmer, who paid $150,400 for charity in an online auction, has squirreled his away under his bed, where he hopes it might someday recover in value. Someday soon: "I hate to tell you," he told the Journal," but we are kind of waiting for him to pass on."